Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

thundering,
” said Ron irritably. “We’re walking. Sorry 
if we’ve disturbed the top-secret workings of the Ministry of Magic.” 
“What are you working on?” said Harry. 

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CHAPTER FIVE 
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‘
“A report for the Department of International Magical Cooper-
ation,” said Percy smugly. “We’re trying to standardize cauldron 
thickness. Some of these foreign imports are just a shade too 
thin — leakages have been increasing at a rate of almost three per-
cent a year —” 
“That’ll change the world, that report will,” said Ron. “Front 
page of the 
Daily Prophet,
I expect, cauldron leaks.” 
Percy went slightly pink. 
“You might sneer, Ron,” he said heatedly, “but unless some sort 
of international law is imposed we might well find the market 
flooded with flimsy, shallow-bottomed products that seriously 
endanger —” 
“Yeah, yeah, all right,” said Ron, and he started off upstairs 
again. Percy slammed his bedroom door shut. As Harry, Hermi-
one, and Ginny followed Ron up three more flights of stairs, shouts 
from the kitchen below echoed up to them. It sounded as though 
Mr. Weasley had told Mrs. Weasley about the toffees. 
The room at the top of the house where Ron slept looked much 
as it had the last time that Harry had come to stay: the same posters 
of Ron’s favorite Quidditch team, the Chudley Cannons, were 
whirling and waving on the walls and sloping ceiling, and the fish 
tank on the windowsill, which had previously held frog spawn, 
now contained one extremely large frog. Ron’s old rat, Scabbers, 
was here no more, but instead there was the tiny gray owl that had 
delivered Ron’s letter to Harry in Privet Drive. It was hopping up 
and down in a small cage and twittering madly. 
“Shut 
up,
Pig,” said Ron, edging his way between two of the 
four beds that had been squeezed into the room. “Fred and George 
are in here with us, because Bill and Charlie are in their room,” he 

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told Harry. “Percy gets to keep his room all to himself because he’s 
got to 
work.
” 
“Er — why are you calling that owl Pig?” Harry asked Ron. 
“Because he’s being stupid,” said Ginny. “Its proper name is 
Pigwidgeon.” 
“Yeah, and that’s not a stupid name at all,” said Ron sarcastically. 
“Ginny named him,” he explained to Harry. “She reckons it’s 
sweet. And I tried to change it, but it was too late, he won’t answer 
to anything else. So now he’s Pig. I’ve got to keep him up here be-
cause he annoys Errol and Hermes. He annoys me too, come to 
that.” 
Pigwidgeon zoomed happily around his cage, hooting shrilly. 
Harry knew Ron too well to take him seriously. He had moaned 
continually about his old rat, Scabbers, but had been most upset 
when Hermione’s cat, Crookshanks, appeared to have eaten him. 
“Where’s Crookshanks?” Harry asked Hermione now. 
“Out in the garden, I expect,” she said. “He likes chasing 
gnomes. He’s never seen any before.” 
“Percy’s enjoying work, then?” said Harry, sitting down on one 
of the beds and watching the Chudley Cannons zooming in and 
out of the posters on the ceiling. 
“Enjoying it?” said Ron darkly. “I don’t reckon he’d come home 
if Dad didn’t make him. He’s obsessed. Just don’t get him onto the 
subject of his boss. 
According to Mr. Crouch
. . . 
as I was saying to Mr. 
Crouch
. . . 
Mr. Crouch is of the opinion
. . . 
Mr. Crouch was telling 
me
. . . They’ll be announcing their engagement any day now.” 
“Have you had a good summer, Harry?” said Hermione. “Did 
you get our food parcels and everything?” 
“Yeah, thanks a lot,” said Harry. “They saved my life, those cakes.” 

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CHAPTER FIVE 
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“And have you heard from — ?” Ron began, but at a look from 
Hermione he fell silent. Harry knew Ron had been about to ask 
about Sirius. Ron and Hermione had been so deeply involved in 
helping Sirius escape from the Ministry of Magic that they were 
almost as concerned about Harry’s godfather as he was. However, 
discussing him in front of Ginny was a bad idea. Nobody but 
themselves and Professor Dumbledore knew about how Sirius had 
escaped, or believed in his innocence. 
“I think they’ve stopped arguing,” said Hermione, to cover the 
awkward moment, because Ginny was looking curiously from Ron 
to Harry. “Shall we go down and help your mum with dinner?” 
“Yeah, all right,” said Ron. The four of them left Ron’s room and 
went back downstairs to find Mrs. Weasley alone in the kitchen, 
looking extremely bad-tempered. 
“We’re eating out in the garden,” she said when they came in. 
“There’s just not room for eleven people in here. Could you take 
the plates outside, girls? Bill and Charlie are setting up the tables. 
Knives and forks, please, you two,” she said to Ron and Harry, 
pointing her wand a little more vigorously than she had intended 
at a pile of potatoes in the sink, which shot out of their skins so fast 
that they ricocheted off the walls and ceiling. 
“Oh for heaven’s 
sake,
” she snapped, now directing her wand at 
a dustpan, which hopped off the sideboard and started skating 
across the floor, scooping up the potatoes. “Those two!” she burst 
out savagely, now pulling pots and pans out of a cupboard, and 
Harry knew she meant Fred and George. “I don’t know what’s go-
ing to happen to them, I really don’t. No ambition, unless you 
count making as much trouble as they possibly can. . . .” 
Mrs. Weasley slammed a large copper saucepan down on the 

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kitchen table and began to wave her wand around inside it. A 
creamy sauce poured from the wand tip as she stirred. 
“It’s not as though they haven’t got brains,” she continued irrita-
bly, taking the saucepan over to the stove and lighting it with a fur-
ther poke of her wand, “but they’re wasting them, and unless they 
pull themselves together soon, they’ll be in real trouble. I’ve had 
more owls from Hogwarts about them than the rest put together. If 
they carry on the way they’re going, they’ll end up in front of the 
Improper Use of Magic Office.” 
Mrs. Weasley jabbed her wand at the cutlery drawer, which shot 
open. Harry and Ron both jumped out of the way as several knives 
soared out of it, flew across the kitchen, and began chopping the 
potatoes, which had just been tipped back into the sink by the 
dustpan. 
“I don’t know where we went wrong with them,” said Mrs. 
Weasley, putting down her wand and starting to pull out still more 
saucepans. “It’s been the same for years, one thing after another, and 
they won’t listen to — OH NOT 
AGAIN
!” 
She had picked up her wand from the table, and it had emitted a 
loud squeak and turned into a giant rubber mouse. 
“One of their fake wands again!” she shouted. “How many times 
have I told them not to leave them lying around?” 
She grabbed her real wand and turned around to find that the 
sauce on the stove was smoking. 
“C’mon,” Ron said hurriedly to Harry, seizing a handful of cut-
lery from the open drawer, “let’s go and help Bill and Charlie.” 
They left Mrs. Weasley and headed out the back door into 
the yard. 
They had only gone a few paces when Hermione’s bandy-legged 

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CHAPTER FIVE 
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ginger cat, Crookshanks, came pelting out of the garden, bottle-
brush tail held high in the air, chasing what looked like a muddy 
potato on legs. Harry recognized it instantly as a gnome. Barely ten 
inches high, its horny little feet pattered very fast as it sprinted 
across the yard and dived headlong into one of the Wellington 
boots that lay scattered around the door. Harry could hear the 
gnome giggling madly as Crookshanks inserted a paw into the 
boot, trying to reach it. Meanwhile, a very loud crashing noise was 
coming from the other side of the house. The source of the com-
motion was revealed as they entered the garden, and saw that Bill 
and Charlie both had their wands out, and were making two bat-
tered old tables fly high above the lawn, smashing into each other, 
each attempting to knock the other’s out of the air. Fred and 
George were cheering, Ginny was laughing, and Hermione was 
hovering near the hedge, apparently torn between amusement and 
anxiety. 
Bill’s table caught Charlie’s with a huge bang and knocked one 
of its legs off. There was a clatter from overhead, and they all 
looked up to see Percy’s head poking out of a window on the sec-
ond floor. 
“Will you keep it down?!” he bellowed. 
“Sorry, Perce,” said Bill, grinning. “How’re the cauldron bot-
toms coming on?” 
“Very badly,” said Percy peevishly, and he slammed the window 
shut. Chuckling, Bill and Charlie directed the tables safely onto the 
grass, end to end, and then, with a flick of his wand, Bill reattached 
the table leg and conjured tablecloths from nowhere. 
By seven o’clock, the two tables were groaning under dishes and 
dishes of Mrs. Weasley’s excellent cooking, and the nine Weasleys, 

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Harry, and Hermione were settling themselves down to eat beneath 
a clear, deep-blue sky. To somebody who had been living on meals 
of increasingly stale cake all summer, this was paradise, and at first, 
Harry listened rather than talked as he helped himself to chicken 
and ham pie, boiled potatoes, and salad. 
At the far end of the table, Percy was telling his father all about 
his report on cauldron bottoms. 
“I’ve told Mr. Crouch that I’ll have it ready by Tuesday,” Percy 
was saying pompously. “That’s a bit sooner than he expected it, but 
I like to keep on top of things. I think he’ll be grateful I’ve done it 
in good time, I mean, it’s extremely busy in our department just 
now, what with all the arrangements for the World Cup. We’re just 
not getting the support we need from the Department of Magical 
Games and Sports. Ludo Bagman —” 
“I like Ludo,” said Mr. Weasley mildly. “He was the one who got 
us such good tickets for the Cup. I did him a bit of a favor: His 
brother, Otto, got into a spot of trouble — a lawnmower with un-
natural powers — I smoothed the whole thing over.” 
“Oh Bagman’s 
likable
enough, of course,” said Percy dismis-
sively, “but how he ever got to be Head of Department . . . when I 
compare him to Mr. Crouch! I can’t see Mr. Crouch losing a mem-
ber of our department and not trying to find out what’s happened 
to them. You realize Bertha Jorkins has been missing for over a 
month now? Went on holiday to Albania and never came back?” 
“Yes, I was asking Ludo about that,” said Mr. Weasley, frowning. 
“He says Bertha’s gotten lost plenty of times before now — though 
I must say, if it was someone in my department, I’d be worried. . . .” 
“Oh Bertha’s